For a style that always promised the future, cyberpunk fashion has had a remarkably patient timeline. The neon-soaked aesthetic of long coats, mirrored shades, structured silhouettes, and tech-laden accessories first reached mainstream attention in the eighties, faded for stretches in the early twenty-first century, and is now coming back with a force few stylists expected. The trigger this time is the rise of artificial intelligence in everyday life, which has reshaped how people imagine ...

Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer. High-impact opportunities Why? Performance at tech companies is dominated by outlier events . When I think about the most imp...

Last week I wrote about the problem with using the accept attribute for uploading files. As a quick reminder: When you use the accept to specify which file types will be allowed like this: …the dialog will disable invalid types like this: This is bad because: The disabled files are greyed out making them hard to read Some users won’t notice the subtle greyed out styling - so will try clicking the invalid files anyway And this will make the interface feel unrespo...

Many years ago I was briefly part of a university group trying to get better working conditions for grad students, post-docs, adjuncts, and other members of academia’s petite bourgeoisie. (And yes, we were the sort of people who used terms like “petite bourgeoisie” to show each other how clever we were.) One Tuesday evening an older gentleman showed up to one of our meetings. He listened patiently as we talked, then cleared his throat and said, “You know, there’s probably an easier way...

1948 was an interesting time for computing. For decades, businesses had used punch card equipment that added and sorted electromechanically. Now these electromechanical relays and counting wheels were being used to build room-filling general-purpose computers such as Harvard Mark I (1944) and IBM's SSEC (1948). But slow electromechanical mechanisms were already becoming obsolete. World War II had fostered the development of electronics and vacuum tubes for radio, radar, and navigation. Electroni...

I've been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics I've been looking for. I've released it as an alpha package called micropython-wasm , and I'm using it for a code execution sandbox plugin for Datasette Agent called datasette-agent-micropython . Why do I want a sandbox? What I want from a sandbox WebAssembly looks really promising here MicroP...

I t was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman, needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms… Source I t was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary ...

Hello, Nice to see you all again so soon. Mixed rockets Genhis Imagine you are setting up your first space platform. You start building tiles, a full rocket-load is sent. When you need belts, assembling machines or furnaces, again, a full stack is sent. A small platform could request 10-20 automated rockets and leave plenty of unused items in the inventory. The advantage is that you don't have to wait for more when you decide to rebuild it or add machines. This is how we ...

A week in which some things happen and some things do not happen, much like other weeks.  Current situation: Not pictured: The 3 different kinds of beef jerky we just got at Buc-ee’s. The pain of having children who become driving teenagers is the exorbitant cost of auto insurance. The joy is getting to stare out the window as the midwestern landscape moves by and think about nothing and everything for hours at a time.  Monday 01 June: Dentist in ...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html

The familiar sounds of the espresso machine never cease to calm me – the joy of the familiar, but also the potential of the variable: of sounds at new tones, of different cadences. Watching as the barista makes sure to stop pulling the espresso shot at 33 seconds — precision at every step. Classical music, quiet conversation, and the awakening of the day permeate the cafe, illuminated by the light passing through the tall windows, and accompanied by the smell of freshly brewed coffee. I hear...

Our 64-bit Intel and AMD processors have evolved over decades. When you compile a Go program for a 64-bit Intel or AMD processor, the compiler targets, by default, a nearly 20-year-old instruction set. The binary that comes out runs on essentially any x64 chip, but it also leaves on the table every instruction that was added since 2003. We often refer to microarchitecture levels . Each level bundles a set of instruction-set extensions that you can assume are present: Level Adds (rou...

“Glasgow, Saturday Night” by John Atkinson Grimshaw, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Iran war Iran breaks off negotiations with the US and vows to “c...

A few months ago I wrote about using LLM agents to help restructuring one of my Python projects . It's worth beginning by saying that the rewrite has been successful by all reasonable measures; I've been able to continue maintaining that project since then without an issue. In this post, I want to discuss another project I've recently completed with significant help from agents: watgo . In this project many things are different; most notably, it's a from-scratch project rather than a rewrite...

Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one . But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC , Raspberry Pi Connect , or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are great, and so is SSH if you don't need a full desktop. Since the PiKVM came out in 201...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Barry Hess, whose blog can be found at bjhess.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I’m a programmer-type from rural Minnesota. I grew...

My inlaws and I had so much fun in Vietnam last year that we deciced to come back again, if only for a short week this time owing to available leave and other commitments. The plan this week is to stay around Ho Chi Minh City and the southern part of Vietnam, and explore some of the sights we ran out of time to explore last time. Last time was also a bit of a wirlwind, so I didn’t get as much time to write about it. If I hadn’t made it clear last time, Vietnam is one of my new all-time f...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan. Image: ISRO India’s Chandrayaan program is one of the few in the world dedicated to the exploration of our Moon. Starting with its discovery of lunar water that catalyzed the global Moon rush of today, the program has gotten media and creator attention worldwide. However, the coverage has often lacked the program’s specific scientific, technological, and geopolitical outcomes being laid out and contextualized agai...

Mirroring a static Hugo blog onto ATProto with standard.site and Sequoia, plus the GitHub Actions wiring that republishes the records on every push without any manual steps. Mirroring a static Hugo blog onto ATProto with standard.site and Sequoia, plus the GitHub Actions wiring that republishes the records on every push without any manual steps.

(In 2008 I wrote a survey of some of the known sum-product theorems, see  here . Avi Wigderson has a great slide-set on sum-product theorems and their applications---the slides are on Avi's webpage of talks he has given (all the talks are excellent) which is  here . I had a prior post on sum-product theorems  here )  If \(A\) is a set then let \(A+A = \{ x+y \ \colon\  x,y\in A \} \),     \(A\cdot A = \{ xy \ \colon \  x,y\in A \} \). Let \(A= \{1,\ldots,n\} \). \(|A+A| = \Theta(n...

Automatic programming dramatically speeds up writing software in certain use cases and in the right hands. In my experience the output does not reach the structural quality and economy of complexity of the best hand-written software. However, not all the software is stellar, and my feeling is that automatic programming surpasses most of the times (and if well managed) the quality of decently developed hand-written code. Yet, there is a tradeoff between quality and time, in the case of writing...

There is a strange thing that happens in communities that gather around abstinence from something: identity from opposition. At their best these communities are not just negative: childfree spaces can be about autonomy, choice and acceptance, anti-car spaces about safer streets and transit, and LLM-skeptical developer spaces about the future of labor, code quality and slop 1 . But the thing being refused often does not go away and instead becomes the main subject of the community’s identit...

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